Speaker
Description
The ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) programme aims to resolve critical physics questions for ITER operation and the development of plasma scenarios for a future fusion reactor. While diagnostics are regularly upgraded to support these efforts, safety systems remain in place to protect the machine. As a pulsed device, each plasma discharge is valuable, making losses due to false positive interlock actions costly. The safety systems, including those linked to neutral beam injection (NBI), are configured conservatively because beam shine-through and its potential to damage plasma-facing components, in low density plasma. Though well-studied, providing better real-time and reliable data was not always possible. A new implementation using intelligent data acquisition systems enables real-time in FPGA processing of the Thomson diagnostic density evaluation and direct communication, according to a set of rules, with the neutral beam injection interlock system to relax the thresholds of operation of the latter. To achieve these goals, the Thomson scattering evaluation has been ported to real time with development tools that use High-Level Synthesis combined with traditional hardware description languages. The hardware platform used is a Teledyne-ADQ32 DAQ device. Second, a new decision-making module has been implemented, allowing direct diagnostic to interlock system communication. The results are always shared with the integrated discharge control system (DCS) real-time application, but it is not necessary, making it a software independent interlock system. The contribution describes the hardware and software elements used in the evaluation, the methodology used for the hardware and software implementation, and the results obtained.
| Minioral | Yes |
|---|---|
| IEEE Member | No |
| Are you a student? | No |